Generally covering the broad topics of computing and related technology.
Google’s claim to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” has earned it an aura of objectivity. Its dominance in search, and the disappearance of most competitors, make its lists of links appear still more canonical. An experimental new interface for Google Search aims to remove that mantle of neutrality.
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Technology has completely transformed the global food supply system, yet still hasn’t brought an end to hunger. For that to happen, the choices we need to make are political, not technological.
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A Turkish scientist’s obscure theoretical breakthrough helped the Chinese tech giant gain control of the future. US telecoms never had a chance.
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Smart cities haven’t brought the tangible improvements that many hoped they would. What comes next?
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Dark patterns are user interfaces that benefit an online service by leading users into making decisions they might not otherwise make. Some dark patterns deceive users while others covertly manipulate or coerce them into choices that are not in their best interests.
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Why, Vespignani wondered, were computer networks still susceptible to viruses even though millions of individual users had antivirus software? The answer, he discovered, was that if you didn’t inoculate the nodes, malicious code could still zip around the internet with relative ease.
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[This article explores] the need to evolve our understanding of the utility of existing Internet speed test tools and consider how these tools may need to be redesigned to present a more representative measure of a user’s Internet experience.
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Silicon Valley’s mythology of independence to the contrary, politics and government are absolutely central to its story.
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This article also travels in time through various storage media, diving into how data has been stored throughout history. By no means does this include every single storage medium ever manufactured, sold, or distributed. This article is meant to be fun and informative but not encyclopedic. It wraps up with a look at the current and future technologies for storage.
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In this work, we briefly survey the first decade of research in social bot detection. Via a longitudinal analysis, we discuss the main trends of research in the fight against bots, the major results that were achieved, and the factors that make this never-ending battle so challenging. Capitalizing on lessons learned from our extensive analysis, we suggest possible innovations that could give us the upper hand against deception and manipulation. Studying a decade of endeavors in social bot detection can also inform strategies for detecting and mitigating the effects of other—more recent—forms of online deception, such as strategic information operations and political trolls.
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The Open Compute Project was started as an effort to allow other companies running datacenters to benefit from the power efficiencies as well. If more organizations run rack-scale architectures in their datacenters, the wasted carbon emissions caused by conventional servers can be lessened.
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Artificial intelligence is taking the ability of affordable smartphone apps to empower the blind and visually impaired to the next level.
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What is the point of company-specific sets of principles if the content is largely the same, as we have seen? If well done, the point is that organizations with their own customized set of AI principles can determine how to weigh competing principles and which intrinsic value to prioritize when core principles (and theories) conflict.
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“Navigating in Real-Time Environments” Communications of the ACM, December 2020, Vol. 63 No. 12, Pages 26-28 The profession of IT By Peter J. Denning “Jim Selman has been a professional leadership coach for over 30 years. He frequently encounters executives …
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ASIC teams always fight the FPGA concept. ASIC designers ask, “Which functionality do you want?” and are impatient if the answer is, “I don’t know yet.”
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The HTTP standard, the language of web servers, was born humbly in 1990 as the hypertext transfer protocol. HTTP was basically just a few verbs—simple commands—that a browser said to a web server. The most essential of these were GET, which asks a server for information, and POST, which sends info back.
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The really interesting question is what a strong successful analogy, matching computer viruses to organic viruses, would mean.
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There are very few legal limits on what governments can do with even the most personal data once they have it.
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If and when this technology will make its way into your average passenger vehicle is uncertain, but there is no doubt that companies have been moving closer toward their goal.
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Human civilization does not tend to agree among issues such as fairness, equality, safety, security, privacy, and self-determination (for example). With COVID-19, economical well-being, health care, climate change, and other issues (some of which are considered here), if we cannot agree on the basic goals, we will never reach whatever they might have been—especially if the goals appear to compete with each other.
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